John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Food Security) Share this | Hansard source

The former Prime Minister started them and the current Prime Minister has made them far worse. Debt levels continue to rise and the government continues to pull money out of consolidated revenue to pay for policy failures.

The coalition can be trusted to restore public finances and public confidence. We will do this by scrapping the carbon and mining taxes and we will do this by showing people that we can stop the boats—we stopped them once and we will stop them again. The last Labor government took 14 years to knock up $100 billion debt. It took us 10 years to pay that back and another two years to leave $70 billion for the next Labor government to get rid of and add another $170 billion in debt. We will do it again, but the sooner we do it the sooner we can restore this country to some confidence and some competence.

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